You know, I’ve always had a problem understanding those who claim to be, ‘not political.’ My dear old recently departed mom, a Brit of Irish descent, inculcated in me at an early age with the ethos long embraced by Europeans, who had had their fill of wars trumped up by monarchs and other elites over the millennia. These conflicts would invariably be fought by the hapless peasantry and middle classes, who would suffer and die for the glorification and enrichment of those elites. The people of these more advanced, educated and democratic countries learned, through hard experience, that unless the ever-growing aggregations of great wealth (which seem to be an inherent feature of human societies) are heavily taxed, and those monies used to educate and to serve the ‘convenience and utility’ of the masses so that they are no longer desperate for any kind of employment, that that vicious cycle of political exploitation of the many by the few at the top of the economic ladder, would be an endless cycle, getting worse and ever worse as the technology of killing advanced.

Having lived and worked in London all through the WW II German blitzkrieg, and though she lost her mother when she was a young girl, she was always a precursor to the women’s liberation movement, decades before the term existed. She was also an early activist in the civil rights era, back when MLK was waking up the world to the outrageous injustices that were routinely visited upon those who were called, at the time, Negroes.

I remember when she learned that people of color, no matter how well-off they might be, were never shown houses in Upper Montclair by local realtors, but were steered toward properties in the lower, black part of town. She just put a little ad in the local paper and began the ‘Montclair Fair Housing Committee’ in our NY suburb neighborhood, to pressure realtors to desist from these discriminatory practices.

Anyway, having fallen away from her lifelong connection to the Catholic Church after seeing the reactionary way so many of her fellow parishioners reacted to the civil rights struggle, in her older years she embraced the beliefs of the Baha’i religion, one of which was to ‘not be political.’ Back when my siblings and I would all gather for an occasional Christmas, she would beseech me not to talk politics with my older Republican brother. As much as I would try to accommodate her, I would always find that it’s simply not possible to separate out ‘politics’ from the rest of life; politics IS life. One comes face to face with it everywhere one turns.

Take, for instance, the road infrastructure here in the County; it’s kind of like an unwritten contract that we affirm daily, that allows us to drive at the speed limit even through fog, confident that there will be a passable road ahead; that some political entity has allocated tax funds, let contracts, etc. to ensure that we will not suddenly drive into an unmarked road slip out.

It seems like, in recent years, we’ve come to the point where the governing political system is simply failing to fulfill its side of the bargain on the very basic level of providing the essentials of modern life to us taxpayers. Potholes are constantly forming on most of the County’s rural roads, and however frequently County crews patch them with blacktop, it is never frequent enough.

I read in an interview with John Pinches, who will hopefully become supervisor again, that for some reason the county is just doing a whole lot less chip sealing and repaving than it did years ago, despite more people and more tax income.

The roads are but one example of the myriad ways in which the 99 percent of us are impoverished by the 1% and their obsession with tax cuts; as Paul Krugman points out in a recent article, the Trump voter states are voting for their own impoverishment. Having been left behind by the global economy which is enriching the highest income, high education level cities, while old blue collar jobs were off-shored to China or Vietnam, those struggling old-economy state’s people were suckered by the Charlatan in chief’s ridiculous promises to bring back their moribund industries, only to see him exacerbate their problems by cutting taxes on the richest, who were already doing better than they ever had, thus mandating cuts in every part of the already meager infrastructure expenditures.

Compared to other first world democracies, the very rich in this country have been enjoying a virtually free ride on the full panoply of protections of their wealth and position provided by a system largely financed by the rest of us.

That’s why I was floored the other day when a very smart and well educated friend of mine opined that he favored the Steve Forbes style flat tax, which would constitute an even bigger gift to those at the top, (as if the HUGE tax giveaway lavished on them recently by Trump and his congressional harem weren’t enough), and less for all the needs of the rest of us. How does the system manage to sell otherwise smart people such irrational policies?!